


A Gradual Revelation

by forthegreatergood



Category: Marvel 616, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, First Kiss, Getting Together, M/M, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-30
Updated: 2015-08-30
Packaged: 2018-04-18 03:31:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4690493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forthegreatergood/pseuds/forthegreatergood
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five stages in the evolution of Clint's relationship with his handler.</p><hr/><p>“Am I being pranked, sir?” Clint managed.  The idea of Coulson being attracted to anyone, let alone him, was foreign.  The only time he’d seen so much as a twitch of normal human sexual behavior out of Phil had been job-related, and Clint wasn’t sure that schmoozing on an admittedly pretty but also very well-connected senator at a military contractor’s high-end mixer really counted.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Gradual Revelation

**Author's Note:**

> All characters property of Marvel.
> 
> Not beta-read. Please post any noticed errors in the comments, and they'll get fixed.

One

The first time was entirely Phil’s fault, and Clint felt like he could defend that position in court, if he had to. He’d still been trying to decide if he even _liked_ Coulson--whose shoes were never scuffed and whose shirts were never wrinkled and whose reports were never, ever late, all of which added up to a handler whose personality made Clint want to tear his hair out whenever it wasn’t saving him from an early death in the field--when it happened.

“Barton.” Phil didn’t look up from the pile of papers on his desk. “Thank you for coming. Please, take a seat.”

Clint sat down and waited for the pointed look at the clock and a brief scolding over being ten minutes late to a scheduled meeting. It was almost a routine, now. Coulson would hassle him over his paperwork being late, shoddy, or both. Clint would promise to do better next time without meaning a word of it. They would both get on with their lives secure in the knowledge that neither of them was going to budge on their respective opinions about the importance of bureaucracy.

“What’d I mess up now?” Clint sighed. Phil blinked at him, caught off guard. Wringing a split-second of surprise out of Coulson was almost worth whatever fuck-up he was on the hook for, he thought.

“Barton?” 

“Sir,” Clint added grudgingly. The missing honorific clearly hadn’t been what Coulson had been looking for.

Phil started to say something, stopped, and rubbed his temples. Clint frowned. That was never a good sign. In fact, he couldn’t remember actually doing anything that would merit getting that reaction from Coulson in the past few weeks.

“I didn’t ask you here on account of anything related to your performance, agent,” Phil said firmly.

“I’ve pulled another solo mission, haven’t I?” Clint groaned. Solo missions were, in his opinion, designed primarily to make field agents eternally grateful for their handlers and support teams. They were lonely, dangerous, and usually found some additional and completely unnecessary way to suck balls on top of that. If he’d wanted to put his ass on the line with no backup, he’d still be an independent operator. He’d sent Coulson a text to that effect the last time he’d been shipped out on one.

“No.” Phil shook his head and took a slow breath. “I scheduled this meeting to inform you that I find myself persistently and strongly physically attracted to you, and to offer you a lateral transfer to another team if that attraction makes you uncomfortable, or if you feel it would impact your job performance.”

“I...what?” Clint asked.

“I find myself physically attracted to you,” Phil repeated slowly, his tone gentle. “I’m confident that it won’t alter my ability to work with you. If, however, it makes you uncomfortable, would alter your ability to work with me, or undermines your confidence in my ability to work with you, I can arrange for an immediate transfer to another team not under my supervision.”

“Am I being pranked, sir?” Clint managed. The idea of Coulson being attracted to anyone, let alone him, was foreign. The only time he’d seen so much as a twitch of normal human sexual behavior out of Phil had been job-related, and Clint wasn’t sure that schmoozing on an admittedly pretty but also very well-connected senator at a military contractor’s high-end mixer really counted.

“No, Barton, you are not being pranked.” Phil’s voice was steady and calm, but he was tapping his pen lightly against the file in front of him. “And I do apologize for this. Do you need time to consider whether or not you want that transfer?”

Clint leaned back and crossed his arms. It would be easier for Coulson if he transferred, wouldn’t it? An irritable bit of untidiness, neatly swept out of the way. 

“I’m not sure I want an unexplained transfer on my record, sir,” he said.

Phil’s lips pursed. “It would hardly be unexplained. I’ve already notified my superior, and the reason behind the transfer would be accurately documented. This absolutely wouldn’t reflect poorly on you.”

“You already notified your superior,” Clint echoed.

“This sort of thing does need to be handled with some care, Barton,” Phil pointed out. “SHIELD takes the potential for abuse within the chain of command very seriously.”

Clint rubbed the back of his neck. “Okay, yeah. I would like to take some time and think about this.”

Phil nodded and slid a folder across the desk to him.

“If you do decide on a transfer and would prefer that someone else handle it, Agent Simowitz is your alternate contact. A blank request form and her information is in there.”

Clint picked it up automatically and got to his feet. “Dismissed, sir?”

“Dismissed, agent.”

Clint fanned through the folder on his way to what turned out to be the range. He snorted when he realized where he was going.

“Life throws you a curveball, make sure you can still hit it,” he muttered to himself.

He retrieved a box of ammo from his locker and crammed the folder behind a pair of wadded-up sweatpants he didn’t remember leaving there. So Coulson had the hots for him. So now he knew what it would be like to be propositioned by a robot. So he’d clicked with his current team in a way he hadn’t with any of his previous colleagues and wasn’t thrilled about the idea of ditching them to start over with another batch of operatives. So Clint had no idea what he wanted to do about Coulson’s offer. So what else was new.

Clint checked out a practice pistol, made his way to one of the stalls, and set up the target. He was alone for once, for which he was grateful. He relaxed and focused on simply hitting the target dead center for a few minutes. It was, he’d found, an excellent way to clear his mind of everything but the weight of the weapon in his hand, the feel of the grip against his palm, the draw of the trigger, the sightlines on the target. It was easier to come back to a problem after he’d had some time to just not think. He emptied the magazine and gave the perfect, round hole in the center of the paper an approving look.

It wasn’t as if he’d never had clients, coworkers, or superiors who’d been obviously attracted to him. He wasn’t hard on the eyes, especially for his line of work. Sometimes he’d gotten a bit of leering with a side of ogling, with that being as far as it went. Most of the time it had simply been stated like a demand, and he’d been expected to be on board with it if he wanted his paycheck. Coulson’s simple statement of fact and immediate offer of a remedy was a new one on him, as was his own failure to have picked up on it earlier.

Clint considered the past few missions. Coulson had gone a bit farther out of his way to give Clint some privacy when they’d all been holed up together, and he’d declined a group-invite for post-mission drinks. Aside from that, Clint couldn’t think of a single tell. No disregard for personal space, no lingering glances, no unnecessary touching. 

Obviously, Coulson wasn’t into inappropriate behavior. No surprise there. Clint wouldn’t have been shocked to find a copy of the SHIELD regulations manual in his nightstand instead of a Bible. 

Obviously, Coulson had a pretty tight lid on it. Also, Clint thought, not a surprise. Coulson could stumble into an armed robbery, assess the situation, and make a move all without batting an eye. 

Obviously, there was still a lot of room for Clint to get burned if he stayed where he was. However much Coulson might have openly and freely admitted to any superiors who’d listen, Clint was still a field operative. Assets like him had a short shelf life, and he was more likely to wash out, burn out, or take a bullet than retire. If SHIELD had to pick, Clint’s money was on them siding with Coulson. 

Clint took his time reloading, swapped in a new target, and adjusted the distance. He didn’t particularly want to transfer onto another squad. It had been a long time since he’d been with a crew where he trusted and worked well with everyone. Clint didn’t particularly want a new handler, either. Whatever else was going on in Coulson’s head, he was damn thorough when it came to work. A large part of the team working well together was down to Coulson. Clint trusted his judgment in the field. 

There was also, Clint thought, the fact that Coulson hadn’t even brought up the idea of Clint being receptive to any advances. Coulson was actually quite handsome when he wasn’t taking pains to distract people from that fact. Clint took a fair amount of pride in being more observant than the average agent, and it had taken him a few weeks to notice it once they’d first started working together. Not only had Coulson looked even duller than usual for the planned meeting to discuss this, he hadn’t so much as paused before moving on to the part where Clint could be rotated into a position where he wouldn’t have to deal with Coulson on a regular basis if he didn’t want to. 

Clint squeezed off a few rounds in rapid succession, following up two perfect shoulder shots with a pair of holes in the silhouette’s face where eyes would be. Then again, it was possible he hadn’t considered all the angles. He appreciated the information, and he appreciated having the option. He wasn’t entirely sure what the point of it had been. If he hadn’t twigged to Coulson wanting him on his own, it was disruptive to tell him about it. If there was one thing Coulson wasn’t known for, it was needless disruption. Clint finished the magazine, collected his target, and picked up his casings.

He might as well put the ball back in Coulson’s court, which meant a trip back to Coulson’s office. The part where he twiddled his thumbs for ten minutes while Coulson finished an emergency revision to a requisitions form for an op starting in three hours was, however, unexpected.

“You could have scheduled an appointment,” Phil reminded him evenly, his eyes never leaving the screen. He clicked the mouse one final time, then closed the laptop. “Have you made a decision, or is this because you need more information?”

“You’re not going to do anything, and we both know it,” Clint said without preamble. “Why even tell me about it?”

Phil sighed.

“As I said, Barton, it’s been persistent. It will likely continue. You deserve to at least have the option of a handler who can be more objective about you, especially given the very close quarters in which we sometimes work.” He shrugged. “Beyond that, this is a high-stress environment with unpredictable outcomes. It’s a terrible idea to spring emotionally-charged surprises on operatives in the field. I couldn’t guarantee this wouldn’t come up in the future, but I could make sure it came up in a controlled environment.” 

“Uh-huh. So this is what, preventative maintenance?” Clint asked. 

“I think of it more as disaster-proofing,” Phil said dryly.

“I see.” Clint rolled his eyes. “Well, I’m a grown man. If you can deal with it, so can I.”

And he _could_ deal with it, because he _was_ a grown man. But it got harder not to notice, after that.

Two

If Clint had to lay the blame anywhere, the second time was probably Fury’s fault.

Coulson had disappeared on some level-six mission, which the rumor mill gleefully reported as a personal errand assigned by the director himself. Clint doubted the ‘personal’ part, but it was hard not to assume that the ‘Fury’ part was correct. It was starting to become a habit, and Coulson always made a beeline for the director’s office when he turned back up.

Agent Simowitz picked up their team for the mission Phil was ditching, and Clint could tell why Phil liked her immediately. The woman was fundamentally incapable of fucking around. She knew the op inside and out, she’d considered every likely outcome, she had a stack of contingency plans, and she probably wouldn’t know a joke if it asked her out for coffee.

The op went as smoothly as if Coulson had been there to run it himself, which left Clint with the unpleasant realization that it was actually Coulson himself he missed.

They’d had other field officers pinch-hitting for them before, and Clint had been assigned to other squads on an ad hoc basis. It was only to be expected. SHIELD got better results from stable teams, but SHIELD also spent a sizable minority of its time operating in crisis-mode. In Clint’s experience, that meant dealing with pick-up teams full of people whose names he only learned after the fact and field officers who were a grab-bag of too jumpy, too fatigued, and too green not to make him wish it was Coulson’s voice in his earpiece. 

It was easy to write it off, though. 

Clint missed Coulson because he spent the entire mission wondering when their current handler was going to get them blown to kingdom come. Even when things were going to hell, Coulson still managed to _sound_ calm. It took the edge off, even if the illusion that someone was in control of the clusterfuck of the moment was just that. 

Clint missed Coulson because the field officer on this op had sent them up a blind alley based on an unreliable map with no warning. Coulson’s intel was rarely wrong, and when it was sketchy, he made sure it was flagged appropriately. Coulson didn’t like surprises, and he didn’t trust people’s reactions to them to be productive. 

Clint missed Coulson because nobody had bothered to assign a cleanup detail for the safe house, and the whole experience was worse than it needed to be. Coulson didn’t leave Is undotted and Ts uncrossed, and he didn’t leave blind-spots unexamined. If there was something to be done, somebody would be responsible for it, and it was that more than anything else that made Clint sure Coulson had been an army man before he’d been SHIELD.

Simowitz was cool, collected, and correct about everything. Her logistics were impeccable. She trusted Clint’s assessment of the situation on the ground without needing to be argued into it. She complimented him on a particularly tricky shot, and she even chewed him out the next day for reporting the mission as having been successfully completed two decades in the future. With Simowitz, there weren’t any excuses to hide behind.

He still missed Coulson.

Three

The third time was absolutely, definitely AIM’s fault.

Clint still didn’t know the details of what they’d been there to do. He hadn’t cared on the trip out, and he hadn’t cared in the aftermath. He and Gutierrez were there to cover Coulson. Coulson was there to debrief a Dr. Kozlov, marine biologist, aboard a floating instrument platform that NOAA wouldn’t admit to owning or operating. There had been unusual readings. SHIELD was concerned. Communications had been unreliable, something about radio interference from the phenomenon that was causing the readings themselves. The weather was terrible, and thanks to that and the unreliable radar, Clint spent the first thirty minutes of a hostage negotiation-turned-firefight staring at the horizon, watching for trouble that had gotten there ahead of them.

Between the accounts collected afterward and the ship’s limited security data, Clint knew that Coulson had boarded alone, walked right into a hornet’s nest, and managed to keep everything from blowing up until a weather warning had gone off unexpectedly. AIM’s muscle had started shooting, and Coulson had taken three out of the fight before he’d run out of ammunition. Coulson and Kozlov had then drawn the remaining gunmen away from most of the hostages. She’d steered them toward one of the upper access ports, from which he’d planned to signal the SHIELD transport ship. Given the situation, it had gone well right up until they’d gotten the port open, at which point a ricochet had taken Kozlov down.

The ensuing fight was something of a blur for Clint. The weather made boarding difficult. He had a twisted ankle and Gutierrez had a split lip and two chipped teeth before they even made contact with the enemy. Gutierrez downed two more of AIM’s agents, then moved on to disabling the explosives one of their operatives had attached to the buoyancy controls. While she was making sure they didn’t tip over and die terribly, Clint cleared the last of the AIM gunmen. It seemed like it was over in seconds without any of the details really sinking in.

The aftermath, though, stood out bright and gleaming in lurid nightmare colors.

According to the report, the fall from the access port had been just over ten meters. The water had been just under forty degrees. Coulson had been able to locate and swim to a fixed ladder, but he hadn’t been capable of pulling Kozlov up it by the time they’d reached it. It had taken time for Clint and Gutierrez to clear the hostiles and for the available crew to stage a retrieval, and Coulson and Kozlov had been in the water for twenty-five minutes before they were hauled back out. Coulson had been able to mitigate the heat loss somewhat by holding Kozlov close, but the shock had been exacerbated in Kozlov’s case by blood loss and what had turned out to be a broken scapula. It turned into a particularly gruesome math problem, and some part of Clint’s brain was trying to solve it even as he was stripping Phil out of his wet, bloodied suit with shaking hands.

Treating Kozlov took priority with what passed for a medical team, which was one badly-rattled ARNP, Gutierrez, and three scientists who could barely remember their first-aid training in the heat of the moment. Clint wrapped himself around Coulson, wrapped them both in a blanket, and watched the minutes tick by. Phil was so cold he’d stopped shivering, and his expression was a confused blank, and Clint bled so much heat into him that his own teeth were chattering, and it didn’t seem to make a damned bit of difference.

Then Kozlov had stabilized, and, after what seemed to Clint like an eternity of trying to _will_ warmth back into Phil’s limbs, the nurse practitioner was free to run a heated IV. Clint resented the universe for the need to feel grateful for the violent shivering and slurred demands for a situation report that followed.

“We won, Kozlov’s going to be okay, you almost died, and I really need you to just be quiet until you’re not shaking too badly to talk,” Clint told him wearily. “Please. Sir.”

He couldn’t even muster the energy to lie to himself about Phil being just another comrade and friend after that.

Four

Clint was willing to admit that the fourth time was mostly his fault.

The ratty little motel they’d booked for access during an op had screwed up their reservation and given the squad a pair of rooms with doubles instead of two twins. He could have bunked with Bobbi and Nat, or Bobbi _or_ Nat, if either of them were speaking to him at the moment. He probably could have even wrangled a grudging bit of forgiveness out of one or both of them if he’d just apologized for almost giving them heart attacks by diving off a roof without a secure grappling line. Instead, he’d been stuck with Coulson. 

Phil, of course, immediately offered to sleep on the floor. And he was sincere in the offer; Clint could have accepted. But the carpet was disgusting, and Clint needed Phil well-rested if he was going to be spotting for him. And maybe some part of him had been looking for an excuse to get close to Phil since the AIM clusterfuck, like it could dislodge the feel of cold flesh and the sound of labored breathing from its newly prominent position in his nightmares. Instead of accepting, he reminded Phil that they were both adults.

He couldn’t even pretend surprise when he woke up in the middle of the night to find himself curled tightly around Phil. He’d known it would happen the second he’d felt the way the mattress dipped with Phil’s weight, making it easy for Clint to find him just by giving in to gravity. 

And it _did_ help, was the thing. It did. The warmth radiating from Phil’s back soaked into Clint’s chest through the thin t-shirt he was wearing, and the rise and fall of Phil’s ribs was steady and deep under Clint’s arm. Phil smelled like himself instead of sea water and blood. It all gave his subconscious something to work with besides pain and shock and fear.

He hadn’t quite thought through to the part where now he also knew how well Phil’s body fit against his, and what it was like to have the curve of Phil’s ass pressed against his hips. Now he knew how hard he could get just from Phil instinctively squirming back against him after he’d tried to put some space between them, and just how quickly he could fall back asleep from listening to Phil’s even breathing, and just how unpleasant it was to wake to an empty bed.

All of _that_ gave his subconscious something else entirely to work with, and he couldn’t even call it a hypothetical when he looked up the regs on handler-agent relationships.

Five

The fifth time was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

The job was quick, simple, and easy. They’d gotten a tip about a scheduled drop; one of Stark International’s corporate spies was delivering a copy of Roxxon’s weapons division’s latest project data. She was to leave it in the office of an intermediary that night, and it would be picked up by an SI staffer in the morning. All they had to do was get into the office after the drop, copy the hard drive, and get out without raising any alarms.

It all went beautifully, right up until Phil didn’t make it back to the safehouse. They couldn’t raise him on the comms, and he wasn’t answering his phone, and Clint felt a hard knot form in his stomach when they established that he’d been out of contact for over an hour.

Oddly enough, it was Natasha who lost her cool first. Or maybe, Clint thought, it wasn’t odd. She was raw, going through one of her periods of what Clint had come to think of as emotional defrost. Letting herself form attachments, develop a sense of self, and genuinely trust other people had turned out to require periodic bouts of psychological recalibration, and undoing the Red Room’s programming was a process that she picked her way through carefully and deliberately. 

He’d have given in even if it wasn’t Phil she was talking about when she grabbed his arm too tightly and stared him down and hissed, “He wouldn’t do this. We need to find him _now_.”

Phil had been monitoring the op from a bar on the first floor with excellent sightlines on the elevator. Their security cameras were poorly placed for Clint and Natasha’s needs--the owners were more concerned with employee theft than patron safety--and low-quality, but they were good enough to show Phil waiting at the bar at the very edge of the camera’s range, being approached by a middle-aged woman, and then leaving with her. A rough hack into the cameras observing the building’s front entrance didn’t show him leaving the building, and Natasha tore off through the access hallways and maintenance bays toward the rear exit.

Clint was impressed with her method of locating the comm the woman had taken off Phil. She hadn’t deactivated it, because they’d have registered him falling off the channel immediately. She’d just put it someplace quiet, along with his phone, which had been switched to airplane mode. Natasha simply used their own voices, echoed back to them over Phil’s comm, to guide them toward it. Clint wasn’t comforted by the fact that she was right.

The recording they pulled off his phone was even less comforting. The fact that it hadn’t been sent automatically, as the app was programmed to do, pointed to the use of a cell jammer. The woman had come prepared, and it was unlikely she’d been working alone.

“This was a set-up.” It was all Natasha said before going quiet and tight, her mind going into overdrive as she worked all the possible angles.

Clint just listened to the recording again, hoping to pick up something they’d missed the first time.

Phil’s voice. Soft but no-nonsense. Clint could imagine the expression on his face as he said it. “Shooting me really wouldn’t be in your best interests right now.”

“Please, Agent Coulson. You misunderstand.” The woman’s voice. Friendly, warm. “This is a tranq gun. You’re coming with me. The choice is between walking out of here with me under your own power, completely conscious and in full possession of your faculties, or being escorted out under heavy sedation. I’d prefer the former.”

The little metal dart they recovered from the building’s rear parking lot had blood matching Phil’s type on it, and Clint wasn’t sure where that left their chances. The woman had known who he was and had obviously been looking for him. Phil had taken the opportunity to fight as soon as they’d been away from civilians, or maybe she had lied in the hopes that he’d be easier to tag if he wasn’t expecting it. Phil hadn’t had the chance to raise an alarm, though, which meant he’d gone down quickly.

The rest of the recording was Phil asking her who she was, who she worked for, explaining that SHIELD was in the habit of paying well for information but wouldn’t negotiate for the return of its people. That she could put the gun away, walk out with him, and face no consequences for the kidnapping. The only response had been her easy, chipper “Please keep walking, agent.”

Natasha was comforting on some aspects. “If they wanted him dead, they’d have shot him with a real gun instead of knocking him out.”

She was terrifying on others, and Clint couldn’t remember the last time her seams had shown as badly as when she calmly insisted to Fury that they needed to get Phil back before the drugs wore off and whoever had him started trying to make him talk.

Working their way backward didn’t help. The tip was good. Their source had gotten her information pseudonymously from within SI. She had nothing to give them about who else might have known about the drop, or who might have suspected SHIELD would be interested. She didn’t think the information had been offered to anyone before her, but she couldn’t tell them for certain. The list they generated on their own was too long to narrow down effectively in the timeframe they were looking at. Clint thought Natasha’s proposal that they pick someone likely and start hitting made sense.

Phil came back on his own before anyone had gotten desperate enough to clear Natasha’s plan. She hugged him hard enough to make his ribs creak, and he was surprised but hugged her back all the same.

“I’m all right, Romanov.”

And he was. He was a little bruised--“I think they might have dropped me while I was out.”--and a little rattled, but he wasn’t injured. The report he gave was alarming more for the potential it represented than anything Phil had been subjected to. 

Clint had known that Phil’s time with SHIELD had led to a reputation in certain circles, in spite of his best efforts to blend in with the team and fade into the background. But there was a difference between knowing it objectively and spending the better part of a day quietly panicking all because a Maggia heavy had wanted to talk to the Agent Coulson. The file on Madame Masque gave Clint even more to worry over. She was ruthless and unstable, and just because she’d been volunteering information about a plot to detonate a biological weapon in the middle of Brooklyn didn’t mean that Phil had been safe while he was in her custody.

Clint had to sit on his nerves while Natasha skulked around staring at Phil like she couldn’t believe they’d really gotten him back in one piece, and Sitwell popped up every ten minutes to check some detail of what Masque had told him. It seemed unbelievable, that someone like her would go to all that effort solely to undo someone else’s work.

“This just seems a little out of character,” Sitwell said.

“The Maggia are out for profit and power,” Phil told him. “Something like this would be bad for business. I think there might also have been some expectation that we’d take the Boston incident less personally if they played the good citizen this once.”

“Right.” Sitwell rubbed his hand over his head. “Snatch an agent out of an active mission for a sit-down, and we’ll take things _less_ personally after that. Sure.”

“The mob plays by different rules,” Phil said with a shrug. “I’m sure Fury’s already come up with a way to encourage better behavior in the future.”

It seemed like forever before they were finally alone, and Clint gave in to the impulse to sweep him into a fierce embrace.

“Barton?” Phil asked mildly. He awkwardly patted the small of Clint’s back, unable to reach any higher thanks to the tightness of Clint’s arms around his.

“I was worried,” Clint mumbled into Phil’s shoulder. “Sir.”

“I’m all right. These things happen.”

Clint let go reluctantly, then hesitated. Phil looked tired and drained, and there was a tension to his shoulders and back that told Clint he was trying to be professional about this. Clint tilted his head and leaned forward to brush a light kiss over Phil’s lips. Phil stiffened and rocked back, his face betraying his confusion.

“Barton?”

“I was going to schedule a meeting, but I really, really hate meetings,” Clint told him, trying for a cocky grin and not quite making it. He looked away. “And I had no idea what to say.”

“That you find yourself physically attracted to me?” Phil suggested, his hand straying to his lips. Clint found a little bit of hope in having shocked him out of his normal self-possession.

“That I think I might be in love with you,” Clint said softly. He watched Phil’s eyes widen. “Can I kiss you again?”

“In for a penny, in for a pound.” Phil reached for him tentatively, and Clint kissed him like he’d never have to stop.


End file.
